Body Parts
by Sparkly-elf
Summary: Just a little piece of Jack's hidden passion for drawing.


Body Parts

It was another one of those days. The sun gently slipped between the trees, the sky a streaky gold and pinkie-blue with starlings twittering their song for spring in the distance.

Tapping his pen impatiently on his blue prints, Jack searched the back of his mind for a new idea for his latest 8900 Jackbot. All was blank. He threw is white paint pen to the floor with an angry sigh and rose from the hard metal stool, rubbing his stiff knees with the palms of his hands.

It was 3 am; his parents in a deep sleep so he walked quietly up from his domain in search of food like a lonely animal that had strayed from the safety of his pack, feared to stir the carnivorous elders from their loudly snoring sleep. Pulling open the refrigerator door, he shielded his eyes from the semi-decent light and pulled a can of cola from the middle shelf that reeked of garlic butter and sour cream. He crept back to his lair, turning the lights down low, just enough for him to manoeuvre his way around the table and sat down on the hard stool again, sipping his cold can of cola.

For a while, he just sat there in the low lighting, his mind completely open but thinking nothing. It was so perfect, in the wee hours of the morning your head just swam with broken thoughts and tiredness, dizzy, floating, unfeeling fragments of nothing. Drooping eyelids threatened him with sleep; he shook forward slightly, almost falling into a conscious dream. Snapping back to his reality, he noticed more of his surroundings, the click of the machines around him and the smell of oil and metal shavings.

He reached down under the table and withdrew a slim black sketchbook bound with two small iron rivets and a leather band. He picked up his HB pencil and went back to a drawing that he had started a few nights before. The drawing was nothing more than a few simple lines to guide him along the contours of a small, slightly fat female body. She was sitting down on the corner of a wall and her hand rested her head on her knees. Carefully, slowly, he began to fill in more complicated detail, the soft flow of her hair that fell about and hung loosely around her hunched shoulders. He drew in more lines, showing the fullness of her breasts and the bulge of her stomach, the contours in her arms and her round bell thighs. He gave her baggy jeans and a simple t-shirt, adding a chain to her jeans and giving her wide skater shoes.

He stopped before he got to her face to chew on the end of his pencil, recoiling at its sharp lead taste. A little puzzled, Jack stared at the blank face; four intersecting lines filled the empty space. With a little artistic licence, he drew a few stray hairs around her face and then added a nose, to guide the rest of the face. He added her eyes, making them small at first but then rubbing them out with his eraser and making them a little bigger, to give her a cute, innocent look.

For 2 more hours he sat there, his skinny legs getting stiffer and stiffer from sitting on the stool. Again and again he erased the mouth and the eyebrows, the sketchbook and his desk an array of eraser bits and pencil shavings. He bit down on his tongue in impatience and continued to draw, only to erase it again because it just didn't suit her cherubic face and innocent looks. He was trying to make her look melancholy or bored, but then her tried to make her look thoughtful and dreamy. None of them suited her.

Once again, the eraser met the page and he rubbed away her crossed eyebrows. He put the pencil to his page to do them over, his elbow poised for work. His hand slipped and a line seared across her face before he banged his hand painfully on the edge of his desk. Jack dropped his pencil and held his injured wrist in anguish, flexing it a few times and then picking up his eraser once more to rub away his mistake. Just before the eraser touched the page, he stared at her mouth-less face. His "mistake" was a perfectly rounded eyebrow over her left eye, lowered slightly, making her eyes seem a little tired. It looked perfect rather, compared to the lines he had been drawing recently. He carefully pencilled another eyebrow over her right eye, giving that same hooded, tired look. He smiled in achievement to himself, and started to draw her mouth.

_How would I draw this_, he thought to himself. A frown? A blank expression? No…

He slowly drew a guideline of a small, smiling mouth. Then around it he drew simple petit lips, making the left corner of her mouth curl upwards in a modest smile. He shaded the lips in and around the face, his pencil etching along the page as he created a light source and shaded around it in the page.

An hour later, he laid his pencil on the table and relaxed the burning muscles in his wrist, his sweating brow wrinkled in exhaustion. Sitting up slightly to admire his artwork, he smiled to himself, much like the girl he had drawn, in a little smile of understanding.

It wasn't the greatest work of art, there were many mistakes and some of the detail had been a little too fine, but to Jack everything was perfect. He didn't like the shading, or her clothes or his drawing style, just the fact that he had taken the idea of a small, fat girl with flyaway hair and big thighs and made her look angelic, modest and sweet.

Once more, he picked his pencil up and scrawled his messy signature on the bottom corner of the picture along with the date. He moved his hand upwards to the top corner and wrote the name "BODY PARTS" in his best handwriting. Jack didn't know why he chose this name, or what significance it had, but he closed his sketchbook, before winking at the picture of the girl as if she were an old friend he knew and set down his pencil. He rose from his chair and stretched, his shoulders creaking and his knees stiff with the slow blood flow. He could still see the picture in his head of her, and she was the last thought he had before he drifted off to sleep in his comfy bed, wrapped in soft cotton duvets and a sense of peace with the world.

Authors notes: I don't really know what inspired this little piece, but well… here you go, just a little piece about art.


End file.
